THE NEO-HINDUISM OF BENGAL.*
THE British Empire in India has often been compared with the Roman Empire. 'There are obvious points of resemblance. There is, however, an important difference, and one that may easily be overlooked. It is the pride of the British administration that it has been scrupulously tolerant and impartial in religious matters. It has never helped or hindered Christian missions. Its laws provide absolute equality for all creeds, and wilful insult to any man's religion, be be Hindu or Buddhist, Moslem or Christian, is severely punished. But the Roman administrator could do more. He belonged to en age in which scientific accuracy of statement was not possible. He was contented with fictions and plansibilities, legal and other, which no longer satisfy Western ideas of veracity. As a recent French historian puts it, " the ancient gods were not hostile to one another, as in later times the God of Saint Martin was necessarily hostile to Mercury and Jupiter. In that age, truth consisted not in the adoration of one single God, but in the terror of all the gods. The Roman was generous in his offerings to Apollo of Delphi ; the Gauls of Provence worshipped the deities of the Greek colony at Massilia ; the Emperor Augestns built a temple to the Ligurian god of the chill Mistral wind." So Julius Caesar gladly recognized the Gaulish Belenus as the counterpart of Apollo, and believed, or professed to believe, that Mercury, Minerva, and Jupiter were worshipped beyond the Alps under uncouth local names. English administrators in India were prepared to tolerate local beliefs. What the early Anglo- Indians thought of the cruder Hindu doctrines may be sufficiently gathered from Macaulay's famous speech on the Gates of Somnanth. They could tolerate "heathen" supersti- tions. But far from identifying them with their own religion, they held that Hindu ethics were the very antipodes of those of civilized Christian nations. Let it be remembered that this view of Hinduism applied with special force to the Hinduism of Bengal. Here it was that Tantric and other vicious degradations of Vedic polytheism bad their origin. Here, within the memory of the fathers of men OM living, a district was annexed from its native rulers because human sacrifices to a bloody goddeps were still practised. Let it not smorgitntett/231 _Zift• Br TIM% 1044041
be supposed that Finch crude and savage superstitions are whollY obsolete even in modern Bengal. Readers of Mr. H A. D. Phillips's translation of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel, Kopal-Kundala, will remember the thrilling description of the cannibal Kopalik in one of the opening chapters. [Triibner and Co. MS.]
Yet Bengal has a literature dating from the fourteenth cen- tury, and some Bengali authors, long before the recent vogue of Mr. Rabindranath Tagore's poetry, had won the praise of the few Europeans who had read them. E. B. Cowell trans- lated the Chandi of Mukunda Ram, and asserted that the poet wan a Bengali Crahhe. When English education taught Bengal the art of writing prose, there was a remark. able outburst of literary energy, both in verse and in prose, It must be admitted at once that most-of this new literature was singularly devoid of moral or ethical offence. There was an astonishing assimilation of Western ideas, and it was not for nothing that the earliest printing presses in Bengal were in the bands of Christian missionaries. British administrators could not follow the example of Julius Caesar, or identify Krishna with Christ as he identified Belenus with Apollo. But there was no reason why the quick and acute intelligence of Bengal should not adopt Christian ethics, and discover that they were implicitly contained in their own Scriptures, and especially in the Vedas and Upanishads. If it is to Bengal that Hinduism owes the Tantrio abominations, it was in Bengal that arose the Brahmo Somaj, due primarily to the religious genius of Ram Mohan Roy, who discerned that the ideas of his Unitarian English friends could be easily expressed in Hindu phraseology. The second founder of the Somaj was the Maharshi Devendranath Tagore, a man universally esteemed for his learning and piety. His son, as we are told in the preface to Sadhana, is the now famous winner of the Nobel Prize. " The writer," he tells us, "has been brought up in a family where texts of the -Upanishads are used in daily worship and he has bad before him the example of his father, who lived his long life in the closest communion with God, while not neglecting his duties to the world, or allowing his keen interest in all human affairs to suffer any abatement." He was brought up, that is, in that purified Neo-Hinduism which resulted from the contact with European life and Christian teaching.
That Mr. Tagore does not explicitly or implicitly acknow- ledge the debt which Bengal owes to Christian teaching and example is perhaps not surprising. If Rata Mohan Boy diligently read the Bible, his successors have sought solace and inspiration in the moral teaching of the Upanishads. The result has been that, though many members of the Brahma Somaj abjure caste and other customs once held necessary to membership of the Hindu community, they nevertheless remain in communion with the humbler Hindus who adhere to the old primitive beliefs. The Hinduism of Bengal still provides an unbroken chain which leads from the highly rationalized Hinduism represented in Mr. Tagore's essays down to the Animistic beliefs and customs professed by castes and tribes as yet little above primitive savagery. In the Neo-Hinduism of educated Bengal we have the ethics of Western civilization expressed, as local patriotism requires, in the time-honoured phraseology of ancient Hindu philosophers. How easily the theoretical ethical teaching of these can he applied to modern problems may be learned from the use Schopenhauer made of Anquetil du Perron's imperfect version of the -Upanishads. From the Indian point of view, the Upanishads have this advantage over the Bible, that they enable a Neo-Hindu to write of "God," when he means the Pan-Theoe. A Hindu he remains, but he can use the terminology of Christian philo- sophy without putting a violent strain on the connotation of English words. Read from this point of view, Mr. Tagore's verses and essays have a remarkable significance and interest. In his grandfather's time, the Bengali Hindu was compelled to speak apologetically of the current beliefs of his province. In Maharshi Devendranath Tagore's time, the New Hinduism was still somewhat suspect among orthodox Hindus, and many simple souls regarded the Brahmo Somaj as a heretical innovation. Now, in our own time, Mr. Tagore speaks in the name of all Indian Hindus, and when he lands in India is garlanded and acclaimed by men and women who nevertheless cling to the ancient beliefs. Hinduism has always been tolerant of new doctrines, and can assimilate them as Caesar assimilated Belenus. Finally, we have Mr. Tagore employing his remarkable literary talents in preaching borrowed ethics to Europe as a thing characteristically Indian, and yet fitted to take an equal place by the aide of the loftiest and purest doctrine of Christian teachers.
The New Hinduism is, of course, presented to Christian readers in a deftly attractive form. We have not left our selves space to analyse Mr. Tagore's teaching, but a single passage taken at random spay serve as en example of his method. He defends the pantheistic idea, and says: "The text of our everyday meditation is the Gayatri, a verse which is considered to be the epitome of all the Vedas. By its help we try to realise the essential unity of the world with the conscious soul of man," &p., Rm. It is not likely that many of his European admirers have read the Gayatri. Let ns quote Colebreoke's translation of this famous prayer. "Furth, sky, heaven. Let us meditate on (these, and on) the most excellent light and power of that generous, sportive, and resplendent sun, (praying that) it may guide our intellects." Ergo in an English version, we can feel the picturesqueness and literary y beauty of this famous invocation. Julius Caesar might u ell have welcomed it as a recognition of the sportive splendour of the Apollo who chased Daphne. But that people who profess and call themselves Christians should find solace and delight in Nen-Hindu speculations is surprising. That such a mental attitude is possible perhaps shows to what an extent Christian ethics have been absorbed and utilized by modern Hindus. But it should give us pause to reflect that Hindus, not unnaturally, deny the debt they owe to Christian teaching. and that among the professors of the new ethic are some of the bitterest enemies of British rule in India. Not al! of them are outspoken in their opposition to Western influence. But all of them assert, as Mr. Tagore implicitly asserts, that India has nothing to learn from Europe on the spiritual side.
In the sphere of commerce, of administration, of science, it is not easy to deny the supremacy of Western races. The lessons of history are too plain. But in the matter of ethics and religion, it is possible to oppose an eclectic morality to Christian teaching, and, given a writer of great literary talent, to express this morality in moving and attractive language. We have no desire to belittle the greatness of Mr. Tagore's performance. It is so great as almost to excuse the facile enthusiasms of his European admirers. But there is a fatal flaw of insincerity in its most seemingly elevated utterances. It claims to be the unaided product of Vedic inspiration. It veils a hostility and inexcusable ingratitude to Western teaching. These, even from a purely artistic point of view, are grave defects, and must sooner or later affect the thought- lessly generous applause with which Mr. Tagore'a writings have been welcomed by an indolent age which reads too numb to read carefully. Let us admit that the Hinduism of to-day no longer deserves Macaulay'. blunt condemnation. But let us not forget that the cruder Hinduism of his day still survives, and is accepted as forming part and parcel of the new doctrine. That Mr. Tagore's verses have an extraordinary beauty of sensuous appeal, no one who has any feeling for fine literature will deny. But, as Mr. Tagore himself will readily admit, there are things as beautiful (including the Glayairi prayer itself) embedded in the variegated texture of the Hindu Scriptures. They have been the admiration of many genera- tions of Western scholars, and it may be well that Mr. Tagore's eclectic philosophy should show the European vulgar how much of classical charm survives in modern India. Eclectic it is, however, and deliberately oblivious of its debt to Western teaching. With that we have no particular quarrel. Bat surely it is an element in Mr. Tagore's talent which has been too generously ignored by his Western disciples.
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